T H E T H I N K E R South Af rica’s transition f rom apartheid to democracy was both enabled and burdened by the global political conditions of the late 1980s. The shifting balance of forces at the time meant that the global appetite for authoritarianism was passing as the horizon of possibility suggested by socialism was fading. In other words, democratisation efforts were encouraged by the international community, while radical transformative economic and social projects were not. Tied to this global ‘pressure f rom above’ for political transformation was country-wide mobilisation of the masses of people for change. This local organisation put pressure on, but was unable to dismantle the power of the apartheid military and the white-owned economy. Coupled with that social reality was an ideational perspective articulated by the leading liberation movement, the Af rican National Congress (ANC), that ‘South Af rica belonged to all who live in it, black and white’. In other words, the national imaginary accommodated both oppressor and oppressed, albeit in a new relationship of political equality. The navigation of this moment and the compromises that ensued significantly limited the depth of democratisation that would unfold in the polity. Whilst momentous, the project of democracy- building without a twin project of decolonisation of the social, economic and cultural life of the polity has reinforced the power of the already empowered Johannesburg, Ontario: Street Naming Strategies and the Decolonised City to Come By Melissa Levin | Peer Review 36 NEW CITIES NEW ECONOMIES However, while the reversal of historical injustices discursively informs all statist policy, the reckoning with history as a site of struggle and transformation does not. The end of authoritarian and colonial regimes has generally been accompanied by the spectacle of the demolition of their symbols, or, at least, the removal of their symbols to less prominent spaces. This has not happened in South Africa. and naturalised the impoverishment of the formerly, formally oppressed. This neo-apartheid reality (cf. Ratshitanga, 2019) is evident politically in the reproduction of the bifurcated state (cf. Mamdani, 1996), economically in the persistence of massive un- and under-employment of Af rican people in particular, and culturally in the symbolic presence of colonial statuary and monuments throughout the country. Over two and a half decades after its official demise, apartheid’s presence remains ubiquitous in South Af rica.  It is visible in the gulf between rich and poor, in the spatial geography that still segregates the country, in the statues of Boer generals that still stand tall and proud across the land.  Central to the transformative agenda of the new state is the undoing of this legacy and the elimination of persistent social divisions.  However, while the reversal of historical injustices discursively informs all statist policy, the reckoning with history as a site of struggle and transformation does not. The end of authoritarian and colonial regimes has generally been accompanied by the spectacle of the demolition of their symbols, or, at least, the removal of their symbols to less prominent spaces.  This has not happened in South Af rica.  The statue of the Boer General Louis Botha proudly stands before the entrance to the parliament in Cape Town.  Queen Victoria’s statue guards the back of the relatively democratised legislature.  To reinforce the normalcy of the memorial presence of colonial leaders are the city monikers and streets whose names commemorate colonial leadership, thus obscuring their atrocities.  Modernist theories of the nation suggest that the manner in which the past is constructed is central to building national solidarities and that nationalists build nations through constructing usable pasts.  The ANC has chosen a  bureaucratised  route to accommodating histories in an effort at building national solidarities and legitimising statehood.  Nowhere is this ambiguous, administrative, and often denationalised practice of nation-building more evident than in the street and place re/naming processes in South Af rican cities. But the reproduction of coloniality through public memorialisation on city streets is not a South Af rican issue alone. The title of this essay deliberately yokes together two distant places: Johannesburg and Ontario, in an attempt to make the point that the very character of coloniality is its global reach, and that nationalising memory and counter-memory serves to reinforce institutional practices (like the nation- state itself) that derive f rom European expansion. As illustration, each day I spend countless hours commuting to my place of work at the University of Toronto (or Tkoronto, the Mohawk name for the city) along the Bathurst core to the St. George campus. Bathurst Street is named for Henry Bathurst, the 3rd Earl Bathurst who ran Britain’s colonial office, sent settlers to Canada after the War of 1812 and appointed Lord Somerset as administrator of the Cape Colony. As markers of his colonial reach and success, numerous towns and streets are named for him, such as Bathurst County in New South Wales, Australia; Bathurst Island in Nunavut, Canada; and Bathurst, a small town in the Eastern Cape in South Af rica. Bathurst was also once the capital city of Gambia. That city was renamed Banjul after the end of formal colonialism. St. George signifies a multitude of histories. He was obviously not a coloniser himself, but his memory was deployed in the service of imperialism, his cross the symbol of English domination as represented in the flag, and as a call to conquest when Portuguese soldiers captured Af ricans as chattel in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: ‘The Age of Discovery required a man of arms, and George fit the bill. The conquering knight personified civilization pitted against beastly antagonists and monstrous races. The dragon slayer mounted on his steed antedated the charge: “Exterminate all the brutes.” It would be hard to imagine a better representative of the Portuguese errand or a saint more suitable to the task’ (Hartman, 2007: 65). 37V o l u m e 8 5 / 2 0 2 0 NEW CITIES NEW ECONOMIES As markers of lived space, streets are symbolic and also utilitarian and functional and, as such, are expressions of politics. Colonial city streets are designed to control and assert formal dominance over the colonised. Apartheid spatial geographies maintained segregation in both form and practice. The history of both of these characters is not evident immediately; their roles in the violence of imperialising projects is not apparent. In masking that historical violence, we tend to mask the on-going ‘slow violence’ of systems of coloniality that are reproduced in the present. To get rid of Bathurst everywhere, to decolonise the city, in symbolism and practice, demands that the city to come must be imagined transnationally. An analysis of the symbolic import of street and place names as well as processes of renaming in cities alerts us to the multiple articulations of power in the settler colony/neo-colony. It contemplates the ways in which street and place naming practices normalise a settler presence and colonial present; and, in particular, alerts us to the possibilities and challenges that inhere in efforts to transform the city.     Street re/naming too presents a productive avenue for reading the relationship between cities and the colonial present. Street names, according to Maoz Azaryahu (1997: 311) have been understudied by social scientists ‘in their studies of the structures of authority and the legitimation of power’ since they are ‘ostensibly visible, quintessentially mundane, and seemingly obvious’. Duncan Light (2004: 154) suggests that streets have garnered less attention than public place renaming more broadly in political life and the academy since they are seen at first glance as a ‘trivial topic of investigation’. However, Light argues that street names can be ‘significant expressions of national identity with a powerful symbolic importance’ (2004: 154). Nowhere is this more apparent than in South Af rica where, according to Subesh Pillay, member of the Mayoral Committee of the Tshwane municipality, no other issue of state transformation has created as much oppositional concern and antagonistic mobilisation of both people and resources (Pillay, Personal Communication, 2009/2010). I argue that the everydayness of the street, or Azaryahu’s ‘mundaneness’ of streets and their names after the event of naming, reinforces and reproduces a sense of cultural belonging and ownership. To change the landscape, through renaming practices and in spatial terms, is a form of unsettling, in the sense of both a feeling of unease and instability, and in the practice of removing settlers (not the people, but the practices of coloniality). Streets – as signs of mobility, modernity, and f reedom – are central objects in the imagining of a ‘new’ South Af rica. The apartheid state tasked itself with significantly curtailing the mobility of black people. The ‘tribalisation’ of Af ricans found expression in the ‘Bantustan’ system that apportioned homelands to different tribal authorities, in an attempt to deny the possibility of unified Af rican nationalism as against primordial segregation. The strategy was classically ‘divide and rule’ and, in Mamdani’s terms, South Af rican apartheid did what colonialism achieved across the continent, which was to erect a ‘bifurcated state’ – a state that was racialised at the centre and tribalized at the periphery. A significant part of the ‘traditionalising’ apparatus of the modern apartheid state was to create urban zones of impermanence for Af ricans who laboured in white South Af rica. These transient zones, the urban townships of South Af rica, racialised the landscape into segregated living spaces. Movement, for Af rican people, was circumscribed by the advance of settler colonialism, ultimately articulated as apartheid. As markers of lived space, streets are symbolic and also utilitarian and functional and, as such, are expressions of politics. Colonial city streets are designed to control and assert formal dominance over the colonised. Apartheid spatial geographies maintained segregation in both form and practice. The design of black townships gave expression to the logic of apartheid supremacy. Nowhere was this more evident than in the streets of the township. The usual township had one major arterial route into and out of the township. Rendering residents immobile was imminently available as a mode of control. The web of streets through the townships attest to the impermanence of their residents, at least in apartheid 38 T H E T H I N K E R NEW CITIES NEW ECONOMIES I therefore argue that the idea that history will be forgotten or erased if statues of racists, misogynists and colonisers are toppled, or their names on streets, cities and towns are changed, is misplaced. It is less that the nation- builders will be forgotten than the content of the city will become dominated by another vocabulary, that another common-sense will prevail. theory if not in everyday practice. The venous streets that circulate through townships were mostly unnamed, a symbolic injunction towards the transitory position of black people in white South Af rica. In apartheid’s aftermath, unnamed township streets are not just an issue for symbolic redress, but also a bureaucratic problem for the state. The dispatchment of ambulances or other multiple services of state is hindered in the absence of order, of intransience, of maps. Authoritarian control requires the capacity to close down avenues for mobility. Democratic control demands state access to the individuated mass. The inverse of the restraints on movement for the indigenous populations of colonised countries is the role of streets as technologies of conquest, enabling the colonising forces to expand through indigenous land. This role is explicitly referred to in the context of Canadian colonisation, where streets called ‘Colonization Road’ can be found throughout the provinces of Ontario and Manitoba. These were the roads that encouraged and enabled European settlement, transported economic goods, and forced indigenous people off their land. In naming the landscape and streetscapes of South Af rica, the ‘Af rikanerising bureaucrats’ (Alexander, 1989) also sought to limit the ideational mobility of its subjects. In other words, authoritarian control demands a physical and mental component. Control of the ideational domain is about the production of ‘common-sense’, the construction of the taken- for-granted aspects of daily life (like, in apartheid South Af rica, the belief in the normative value of whiteness and the alterity of blackness). Part of the normalising practices of white dominance included the naming of the environment. The white country in general, and the Af rikaner country in particular, were vivified in the names and languages of its streets and places. It is in this regard that the nationalism of the liberation movement needs to be read differently to the democratising impulses of the global third wave. National liberation was historically posited as a drive towards decolonisation and the idea of democracy was one amongst many means towards achieving decolonisation. But the global democratic moment outstripped the exigencies of decolonisation and the response to statist attempts to name and rename the landscape has been dominated by the former imperative. For Amilcar Cabral, national liberation is ‘an act of culture’, a political act that fundamentally alters the terrain of the taken-for-granted. Part of altering the terrain is the political act of naming. Extending on this perspective, even the forgotten named on street signs become part of the language of a place. They become part of the sound and geography of public space, the vocabulary and culture of nationhood, and what is regarded as a community of people. This quiet and implicit memorialisation is what some scholars refer to as ‘habit memory’ and what Pierre Bourdieu (1977: 82–83) refers to as ‘habitus’, ‘a system of lasting, transposable dispositions’ in consistent albeit muted dialogue which ‘functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations and actions.’ In this sense, street names as part of the vocabulary of a city become devices for what Eviatar Zerubavel (1997: 87–89; 2003: 317) calls ‘mnemonic socialization’ – the process through which citizens are culturally attuned to the narrative of a place prior to, and outside of, a formal process of education. In a sense, it is the everyday reinforcement of groupness. I therefore argue that the idea that history will be forgotten or erased if statues of racists, misogynists and colonisers are toppled, or their names on streets, cities and towns are changed, is misplaced. It is less that the nation-builders will be forgotten than the content of the city will become dominated by another vocabulary, that another common-sense will prevail. The extent to which that common sense internalises the changed markers of the city as more than just a name on a street is a question of democratic politics (which is briefly discussed below). This unremembered historical figure is the peculiar legacy of street and place names. On one level, they are memorial plaques that pepper a cityscape. On 39V o l u m e 8 5 / 2 0 2 0 NEW CITIES NEW ECONOMIES The renaming of streets thus becomes historically momentous on two occasions: at the moment that the street is renamed and political conflict or consensus prevail, and as markers of the cultural content of a city that infuse everyday life with a sense of belonging or estrangement. another, they are simply geographical markers with invisible histories and obscure political import. Street names in this second sense are easily disregarded – in the FSU it was possible ‘to walk along Socialist Street without thinking of socialism’ (Kirschenbaum, op cit: 251). Similarly, King George Street in Durban is equally devoid of political significance or meaning. The renaming of streets thus becomes historically momentous on two occasions: at the moment that the street is renamed and political conflict or consensus prevail, and as markers of the cultural content of a city that infuse everyday life with a sense of belonging or estrangement. In other words, we might not think about socialism whilst trekking down Socialist Street, or know of or think about British Imperialism when ambling across King George but, combined with other street names of the revolution or of imperialism, these nonetheless help shape our imaginations and sense of ownership of a city. In Lefebvre’s (1991) terms, place and street naming work to produce space and to produce its ‘essentialized’ characteristics. Kirschenbaum (2010: 243) regards city streets as ‘palimpsests’ that are expressions of cities of memory. These ghosts, she argues, ‘coexist with the modern state’s tendency to use its control of the city streets as a means of supplanting local associations’ (ibid, 244). Urban geography, particularly manifesting through the street, accordingly inscribes ‘a particular view of the national past’ (Light, 154) by the modern state. But the modern state is neither monolithic nor homogenous. Even if its bureaucratising impulse numbs the political content of those at its helm, it does so differently, conforming to the multiple contexts of the diverse spheres or tiers that institutionalise the state in daily life. The extent to which ‘the national’ can incorporate ‘the local’ and articulate the perspectives of these locals to its own is the extent to which hegemony is achieved, is the extent to which, in this instance, ‘the national’ is achieved. It is the local that, at once, is steeped in and expresses neo-apartheid and is the site through which democratic practices can tear away f rom it. At their most powerful, then, street names are significant as naturalised markers of the cultural content of a city that infuse everyday life with a sense of belonging or estrangement. In other words, we do not think about colonialism whilst walking along Palmerston or down Bathurst Street in Toronto, but combined with other street names of imperialism, these streets help shape our imaginations and our sense of ownership of a city. Familiarity is a forgetting. Part of unsettling the colonial city is about a spatial reorientation that deracialises it, transforms its divisions based on social class, and creates safety for women (among other vulnerable groups). This is eloquently outlined in Ratshitanga’s New Cities, New Economies. As he points out, this is not simply a technical exercise, but is deeply political and as such needs to be mobilised and fought for. And that fight is not easily won. Ratshitanga points to the question of ‘path dependence’ of neo-colonial/neo-apartheid cities that acts to reinforce their presence. Most Af rican capital cities, he points out, are inherited f rom colonial states and these cities, in the settler colonies at least, maintain the spatial divisions devised by colonisers; maintain what Fanon refers to as the Manichaean world of colonialism, the world ‘cut in two’. This path dependence, which is understood as the tendency of institutions to reproduce themselves, even at moments of potential rupture, is evident in street naming and renaming strategies, as the imperatives of struggle give way to the exigent conditions of the moment, to the apparent balance of forces, and to the bureaucratisation mechanisms of statehood. Within the ANC itself, there were multiple contending perspectives as far as memorialisation was concerned. Pallo Jordan, former Minister of Arts and Culture, argued that ‘history would resolve itself’ and was not worth battling in such an emotional terrain. Joel Netshitenzhe contended that the ANC at the moment of democracy was consumed with what it regarded as the more important domain of political- economy. For Bridget Mabandla, former Deputy Culture Minister, the pursuit of a democratic memory was key. Unlike the collapse of regimes across the 40 T H E T H I N K E R NEW CITIES NEW ECONOMIES The UN standardisation gets complicated when contextually administered. The politics of South Africa are such that some of the international resolutions invariably collide. In particular, the resolutions on the promotion of minority groups and commemorative naming practices make for lively political battles. globe, South Af rica had a much less certain or more ambiguous response to the question of transforming the discursive environment of apartheid. Alexei Yurchak (14–16) contends that the primary ‘irreversible results’ of perestroika were achieved ‘at the level of discourse’. This was not the case with South Af rica. For the FSU, the collapse of communism was symbolically accompanied with the tearing down of walls, statues, and monuments; and with the restoration of historical places and street names where, as early as 1990, name changes were central to the transformative agenda (cf. Azaryahu, Light, Kirschenbaum). This was not the immediate case in South Af rica. Daniel Milo segregates street naming in French historical political practice as either honoring heroes or honoring ideas; that is, as ‘honorific’ or ‘ideological’. In South Af rica, changes have most often not been ‘honorific’ of the heroes of national liberation, nor ‘ideological’ (as in ‘Liberation Street’, ‘Freedom Street’ etc.). In significant ways, these untransformed name-scapes are an illustration of path dependence. The South Af rican state begins to democratise within the context of an elaborate domestic and international web of institutionalised and technical naming practices. At the level of the United Nations, its Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) saw the need for a group to standardise geographical names at national and international levels. Amongst other things, ECOSOC was of the view that ‘geographical names’ play an important role in ‘economic, social and cultural development, particularly in the developing countries’ (UN, Resolution IX/2). As such, in 1959, it carved the space for the elaboration of what became the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN). The first conference on geographical names standardisation was held eight years later in 1967 and has taken place every five years since. Between 1967 and 2007, Geographical Naming Conferences under the auspices of the UN have adopted 195 resolutions. Some of those resolutions divide Af rica into four linguistic/geographical groups in the UN Group of Experts on Geographical Names: Af rica, West; Af rica, Central; Af rica, East and Af rica, South (UN, Resolution 111/26). Drawing f rom the UN guidelines, South Af rica has enacted its own legislative f ramework for place names during apartheid, which was amended in 1998. The legislation siphons much of its content f rom the UN recommendations on national standardisation (UN, Resolution I/4), including the establishment of authorities tasked with directing the standardisation of national geographical names (UN, Resolution V/15). The UN standardisation gets complicated when contextually administered. The politics of South Af rica are such that some of the international resolutions invariably collide. In particular, the resolutions on the promotion of minority groups and commemorative naming practices make for lively political battles. In February 2010, the Minister of Arts and Culture, Lulu Xingwana, released the following statement: ‘The standardisation of geographical names in a democratic South Af rica is part of the process of redressing the marginalisation of indigenous language, culture, and heritage. It reclaims this wealth for the benefit of all, now and for the future. It is an exciting and dynamic process filled with opportunity for South Af ricans to enhance their understanding of themselves and their geographical places and in this way, to celebrate our common identity. Geographic names standardisation is not a uniquely South Af rican phenomenon. In terms of United Nations (UN) Resolution 4 of the first UN Conference on the Standardisation of Geographical Names, each country has, the sovereign right to standardise its geographical names and decide what the name for each feature in that country should be and how that name should be written. In 1998 the South Af rican Geographical Names Council Act (Act No.118 of 1998) was passed by Parliament. Names standardisation is part of the broad 41V o l u m e 8 5 / 2 0 2 0 NEW CITIES NEW ECONOMIES The language used is not language of fundamental and revolutionary change, but the language of aspirant social cohesion and a democratic polity that values and foregrounds the notion of a common heritage. reconciliation and social cohesion process. The standardisation of geographical names in South Af rica is part of the healing and reconciliation process, within the broader context of social transformation. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommended the re-naming of geographical features as a form of symbolic reparations to address South Af rica’s unjust past. We all know that many of the existing names of our geographical features are not reflective of our society and our quest for national unity. Names standardisation is not an attempt to obliterate the history of any section of our society. It seeks to contribute towards inclusivity and participatory democracy that acknowledges our common heritage.’ This statement is quoted in its entirety for its careful articulation of the key concerns of the state with regard to history, change, and the rewriting of South Af rica’s national narrative. The state’s considerations of name changes are fundamentally concerned with altering the historical denigration of Af rican life, while not alienating white people f rom a sense of national belonging. At once, the state presents an argument for redressing the specificity of South Af rica’s racist past whilst placing South Af rica in an international context that generalises its concerns and argues its case in terms of a global technicality. The language used is not language of fundamental and revolutionary change, but the language of aspirant social cohesion and a democratic polity that values and foregrounds the notion of a common heritage. The statement goes on to list twenty-eight name changes approved by the Minister. This list mainly comprises the names of rivers, mountains and other ‘natural’ features, ‘innocuous’ changes such as the names of post-offices or other buildings and changes that reflect the correct spelling of Af rican names (such as eNyoni rather than Nyoni). There is a yawning gap between the formal statist naming practices of the ‘new’ South Af rica and the informal conventions of the unofficial living spaces of South Af rica’s burgeoning squatter communities. The ‘informal settlements’ that pepper the urban landscape unabashedly name their places for their heroes, dead or alive, such as Ramaphosa, Thabo Mbeki, or Slovo. The process of the institutional deracialisation of South Af rica’s towns and cities began in earnest in the early 1990s during negotiations between the apartheid regime and the liberation forces. The product of the negotiations was the Local Government Transitional Act (no. 209 of 1993) which laid the groundwork for the incorporation of segregated neighbourhoods into unified local authorities. The imperative of this round of negotiations underscores the impasse that resulted in apartheid’s demise. In political terms, at least, there were no clear victors in the historical battle for and against apartheid. The municipal electoral system, produced alongside the demarcations of the new townscapes, provided for a larger share of the vote for those who became known as ‘minorities’. For most of the country, this system skewed votes in favour of whites. By the second local government elections, the Municipal Structures Act (117 of 1998) and the Municipal Demarcation Act (27 of 1998) had secured overall proportionality of the municipalities and produced the context for the first one-person, one- vote municipal elections. The Municipal Demarcation Act (27 of 1998) reduced the number of municipalities f rom 843 to 284. This included 6 metros (City of Cape Town, City of Johannesburg, City of Tshwane, Ekurhuleni, eThekwini, and Nelson Mandela Bay; Buffalo City and Mangaung were designated as metros after the 2011 local election), 231 local councils, and 47 district councils. Whereas the previous interim legislation had demarcated wards on the basis of segregated areas rather than voter numbers and given ward 60 percent of council seats, the new legislation demarcated wards on the basis of voter numbers and assigned ward and proportional representation seats on a 50:50 ratio. Cities, towns and townships became amalgamated in form into single administrative units, but remained untransformed in content. In other words, institutional 42 T H E T H I N K E R NEW CITIES NEW ECONOMIES continuity was more apparent than institutional change. This is revealed in street naming strategies that after 2000 took the form of adherence to a litany of regulatory mechanisms; of international, national and local legislation for it to unfold. What became clear, especially f rom the experiences in the Tshwane and eThekwini municipalities, is that those with the organised cultural and material capacity to thwart name changes used the regulatory environment to do so. Simply put, the regulatory environment provided opportunity for the reinforcement of already existing power relations, as conf rontations in courts played out between the local state and Af rikaner social movements. Absent f rom these contests were previously disenf ranchised peoples. In contrast to that approach to street name changes was the 2013 Ogimaa Mikana project in Toronto. This project is indigenous-led and insists on reclaiming colonised space through (guerrilla) renaming strategies of streets, lanes, and pathways. This reclamation happens through the restoration of Anishinaabewomin place names inserted over the Canadian name. For instance, the hip Queen Street West in downtown Toronto was renamed Ogimaa Mikana or ‘leaders’ trail’ as a tribute to the women leaders of the resurgent Idle No More anti-colonial movement. Spadina Road, another street that often takes me to work, was recast as Ishpadinaa which corrects the corruption of the O jibwe name. These naming tactics are an attempt to make visible the attempted erasure of Toronto’s indigenous history. Typical of colonialism as an event and ongoing process is the effort to name space since, in naming, a culture appropriates, owns, controls and defines space, in an attempt to negate the violence of conquest. Ogimaa Mikana forces, at least, an acknowledgement that the city we dwell in was not terra nullius. The reception to the name changes has been mixed. Again, in the capacity of institutions to reproduce themselves, Canadian national identity that pivots on the idea of multiculturalism has absorbed and domesticated these new names, and their critique, into that multicultural identity. In other words, instead of indigenous peoples being regarded as a colonised people, they are recast as part of the multicultural edifice of Canadian society, as one group among many. For instance, the Dupont Business Association officially appropriated Ishpidinaa onto street signs, the name sitting above the still operational Spadina. However, the fight against the colonial city has not ended with street name changes. The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission has designated land acknowledgements as part of the everyday institutional practice of public institutions, like schools, universities and legislatures. Every day, children in Toronto acknowledge that they live on and are educated on indigenous land. They also still sing the Canadian national anthem. Indigenous gardens are appearing throughout the city, and the city’s lakes are sites of cultural and spiritual practices. Protests against police brutality and corporate/state alliances in exploiting indigenous lands mobilise thousands. In other words, naming alone does not transform the colonial city. But it is a necessary part of the process. Representation, after all (according to Stuart Hall), is about ref raction – both reflecting and producing normative values and aspirations. It is thus a key site in the battle of ideas and the battle for a changed society. It is on this question – the transformation of society – that the attention of liberation forces in South Af rica has been deficient. Stuart Hall (1988: 7) is instructive here in his analysis of the emergence of Thatcherism as a political project. He posits the important insight by Antonio Gramsci about politics, that it is not: ‘an arena which simply reflects already unified collective political identities, already constituted forms of struggle. Politics… is not a dependent sphere. It is where forces and relations, in the economy, in society, in culture, have to be actively worked on to produce particular forms of power, forms of domination. This is the production of politics – politics as a production.’ The Thatcherite project was thus one to transform the state in order to restructure society (Hall: 3). Like early decolonisers, the liberation forces in South Af rica sought first the political kingdom in the expectation that all else would follow. But, in the above analysis, the political kingdom does not just exist, but has to be actively built. The political kingdom is not a given and is never homogenous. This is true of both the state and society. A democratising and decolonising project would have to create a new cultural dispensation, one in which the subjection and subjugation of black people and women articulated through the naturalisation of capitalist accumulation would no 43V o l u m e 8 5 / 2 0 2 0 NEW CITIES NEW ECONOMIES longer persist. Put differently, the historic project would be a contest ‘not just for power, but for popular authority, for hegemony’ (Hall: 4). What this refers to is a contest for the transformation of common-sense, taken-for-granted ways of being in the world. This project demands a deepening of democratic life, a democratic proliferation that is usurped in the current moment by the tendency towards bureaucratisation and seizing decision-making f rom those resident across the country. The significantly untransformed cities of South Af rica, both in form and content, reflects that bureaucratising tendency. 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